1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a region dividing (or segmenting) method and device for extracting a region, which is a recognizing target in the image, and relates to an image recognizing process device, which is equipped with the region dividing device.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, a region dividing process has been performed so as to serve as an art for extracting such recognizing targets, as “sky”, “ground”, “forest” and “human beings”, in an image.
An accuracy of a region, which is extracted by the region dividing process, has a considerable influence on results of a code processing and a recognizing/extracting processing in later processes. Therefore, the accuracy of the region dividing process needs to be improved.
In a general region dividing method, at first, feature values of information categories (e.g., color information and texture information), which are extracted from target image that is targeted for processing, are used to divide the target image into small regions. Then, adjacent regions, which are similar to each other, are integrated together one by one (see Japan Unexamined Patent Publications No. 2002-32763 and No. 2003-173442, corresponding to US2003/0108237A1).
However, measured values of feature values, which are obtained from the target image, are deteriorated by various noises that exist in the target image. Thus, the deteriorated measured values sometimes cause difficulties, such as an inaccurate extraction of a region.
For example, because of influences of a reflection image of circumstances that is seen on a surface of asphalt in an image of rainy scenery, a change of an object shape due to a backlight, and an existence of shadow, a region of a target object that in reality does not exist is sometimes extracted by mistake. Also, there is a case, where a certain region in a target image shows a uniformed color, although, in reality, different objects are overlapping each other in the region. In this case, there is no difference among the feature values that characterize the regions of each target object. Thus, there is a difficulty in dividing the uniformed color region into each accurate region of target objects.
In order to deal with these difficulties, a device is disclosed (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-32754). The device obtains detected data, which are detected by a plurality of sensors (an infrared camera, a visible light camera and a millimetric-wave radar). The detected data are described as input images. Then, the input images are weighed according to circumstance conditions, and a single target image is generated by merging the weighted input images. The recognizing process is performed with the single target image.
However, the device described in Japanese Unexamine Patent Publication No. 2002-32754 recites a need of performing weighted sum of every pixel at time of integrating a plurality of image data. Thus, there is a problem of increased processing load.
Also, each spatial resolution of each sensor output rarely coincides with each other. Thus, there is difficulty in directly incorporating each set of sensor output information into a pixel of the image.